Y H E ?

I have thought of writing this all down in detail, to help me clarify my own thinking but this is in response to Jan.

When Jax first suggested HE I was dumbfounded. I didn’t know it was legal, possible or practicable.

As soon as I started thinking about it, a number of things came into focus about my own experience at school.

My first memory of school is being in a reading class, I would have been 5. I was asked what I was doing. I replied I was reading the book. I was told to stop and turn back to the page everyone else was on.

This is the first instance I can recall where I was actively prevented from learning by a teacher. I could already read, so the education on offer was not appropriate to my age, ability and aptitude. Reflecting on it now, the first priority for a teacher dealing with a large number of children must, inevitably, be to control them and stop them from doing anything they have not been explicitly directed to do.

In other words, the teacher has to actively stop children from following their natural inclination to learn things which are of importance and interest to them in order that they can be taught things which are of importance and interest to the teacher or some DFES official.

Being processed through this system, I ended up bored, disinterested and alienated, I put in the minimum effort I could to avoid active criticism, mostly achieving marks just above average, regardless of the subject and level of difficulty.

Overall, school was a waste of 13 years of my life.

All the things I was taught at school which are of use, I could have learnt much more quickly, efficiently and better on my own.

All the things which I use in my work are self taught. This is not unusual in Web development but my father, who is quite anti home ed, left school at (I think) 13. He went on to study at home at night, qualified as a chartered surveyor, rose to be one of the senior partners in one of the largest surveying partnerships, and at the time of his retirement was a director of the largest estate agency company in the country.

..and he is anti home ed? What the hell did schools do for him?

Similarly, my ex-wife’s father who left school quite young was one of the most ‘educated’ people I have ever met. He started work as a clerk with the GLC and later worked as a consul in the diplomatic service. He spoke English, French, German, Spanish, Polish, Greek, Russian and Italian (and maybe some others too). he was very widely read, his leisure reading in retirement consisted of a rotation of books in English, Spanish, French and German.

He was self taught.

So what use is school. They teach you nothing much except not to learn.

At the time I didn’t dislike school, I was merely bored by it and just accepted it as a necessity, something I had to endure.

But I simply cannot think of any good reason to send my children to school.